Abstract for the 61st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 26-28 March 2015, Berlin, Germany.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
To make a profit in early modern Southeast Asia, the English East India Company (EIC) soon learned that knowledge of the lingua francas, Portuguese and Malay, was not enough. The EIC made an effort to employ merchants who knew many languages, and employed foreigners as interpreters, yet we know precious little about the linguistic world EIC servants worked in. This paper charts the multilingual environment of the EIC trading post in Japan (1614-1623). The surviving records of the trading post provide vital evidence of how they learned local vernaculars and used them in their daily life. There are rare instances of explicit description of language use, but more importantly, EIC merchants' wills and inventories show that they acquired books written in local languages, and their letters are full of loanwords and borrowed phrases from Asian languages, revealing the effects of daily language contact.